2006’s American Dreamz is a comedy that attempts to satirize both the Bush Administration and the television program American Idol. Using an ensemble cast of characters, director Paul Weitz (In Good Company, American Pie) attempts to draw attention to the fact that more people in America seem obsessed with voting for the next pop idol than they do participating in the democratic process involving politics.
The film follows several storyline arcs to make this point. Hugh Grant stars as a Simon Cowell-type British television show host. He plays Martin Tweed, the host of American’s favorite program American Dreamz. American Dreamz essentially follows the same format of American Idol, with a few differences, and is designed to find the next insta-celebrity in America. Tweed goes on the look-out for stars, season after season, and more people vote for this new pop star than do in the entire American election process. Tweed is a self-loathing individual that thinks the country hates him and that the world thinks he’s an ass, but Grant really does little to bring this notion to life. Instead, Grant’s Martin Tweed lacks anything that makes him truly loathsome and, more importantly, lacks anything that makes him truly interesting.
Of course, that’s the trend with American Dreamz. Dennis Quaid plays the President of the United States. True to form, the President is in bed after he wins his second term in office and the public starts to wonder where he is. To shake things up a little bit, his advisers decide that the President should make an appearance on American Dreamz and should be a judge on the final episode. The President agrees and we’re off to more zany fun as the Bush-impersonator President, according to Dennis Quaid and Weitz, stumbles and bumbles through his scenes.
The contestants for the show are also followed by this meandering and disconnecting plot. Mandy Moore plays one of them, a trailer trash hopeful with an Iraq war veteran boyfriend. Sam Golzari plays another contestant, who just happens to be a terrorist with a love for show tunes. All of these plots attempt to intersect on Weitz’s direction, drawing in even more characters to this convoluted mess of a film and attempting to draw parody on top of parody to hammer home the point even more. Unfortunately, without any clear focus and with such a crowded house of moronic stereotypes and obvious satirical misfires, American Dreamz flops and flounders around like a fish out of water or, better still, like a film without direction.
Let’s face it: the film is terrible. American Dreamz may well be one of the worst films I have seen recently. The reason this film fails so miserably to deliver and the reason a film like Bewitched does deliver, in my opinion, goes back to the argument of context and intention. I can’t flaw a film like Bewitched for scoring on what it attempts to score on because the artistic intent of the film was adequately met. If it wasn’t my flavour, it wasn’t my flavour. But here comes American Dreamz, a film so obvious in its attempt and yet so oblivious in its delivery. It seems that Weitz and Co. missed every single class in film school on satire and parody and, instead, went for dated associations of stereotypical characters and tried to draw our attention away from the poor writing by making the film so crowded with idiotic sideplots and moronic performances that we’d forget what the point was. Sadly, I didn’t.
American Dreamz fails on so many levels that I could barely stand it. This is a film devoid of any real acting power, as each performer is just abysmal and terrible to watch in their respective roles. This is a film devoid of any substance or power through its own satire, as it misses the mark each time and presents such a deconstructive wave of self-realization that it appears any real shots in the dark are accidental. This is a film so devoid of any interesting or compelling or FUNNY script that it becomes blatantly obvious that very little time and effort was spent on constructing characters or interesting things for them to say. American Dreamz has no redeeming qualities, sad to say, and remains as one of the most unintelligent, boring, bland, disturbingly off-base, convoluted, crowded and terrible satires of all time.
0/10
